Chartist Ancestors
What did your family do in the revolution?

Millions signed the three great Chartist petitions of 1839 to 1848. Thousands were active in those years in the campaign to win the vote, secret ballots, and other democratic rights that we now take for granted.

Chartist Ancestors lists many of those who risked their freedom, and sometimes their lives, because of their participation in the Chartist cause. The names included on the site are drawn from newspapers, court records and books of the time, from later histories and other sources.

I would like to thank the many historians, researchers and the descendents of those associated with Chartism who have helped with this site since it was launched in 2003.

Mark Crail, Editor

How to...
Make the most of your visit to an archive or records office

Research your trade union ancestors

Find Chartist records in the National Archives

© Mark Crail

Essential reading
The six Chartist petitions of 1839-51

This page summarises key information about each of the Chartist petitions, showing the number of signatories, where they came from, and links to further resources on individual petitions.

One of the few facts everyone knows about the Chartists is that they presented three petitions to Parliament - in 1839, 1842, and 1848.

But they didn't. There were four national petitions calling for the adoption of the Charter, one national initiative to collect signatures on a large number of local petitions, and one enormous petition seeking the release of Chartist prisoners.

On this page
First national petition - 1839
Petition on behalf of the Chartist prisoners - 1841
Second national petition - 1842
Third national petition - 1848
Fourth national petition
Fifth national petition
Graph showing signatures to the six petitions

First national petition - 1839
The first petition was signed by 1,280,958 people, making it the single biggest petition ever seen at that time. It was also notable for the number of women who signed - even though the petition did not seek to give them the vote. As the table below shows, in some areas, including Ashton-under-Lyne, Carlisle and Monmouth, women signatories were counted separately and amounted to as many as one if five of all those who signed.

On Tuesday, 7 May, 1839, the petition was placed on a low carriage decorated with union jack flags. Delegates to the Convention walked two by two behind it as it made its way down Fleet Street, pausing outside newspaper offices before passing - just - through Temple Bar and into Westminster. From there, it travelled along the Haymarket to the Panton Square house of John Fielden, the Radical MP for Oldham, where it was to presented to Thomas Attwood MP. In all, the petition ran to "three miles (minus 250 yards" in length and weighed six hundredweight or 305kg (Northern Star, 11 May, 1839).

Both Fielden and Attwood, though largely sympathetic, had reservations about the Chartist demands, and in any event its presentation to Parliament was to be held up by a minor constitutional crisis which saw the Whigs fall and return to power before the Commons went into its whitsun recess. It would eventually be delivered on 14 June, 1839.

There was never any doubt in the Chartists' minds that the petition would be rejected, and on 12 July, when Attwood moved that it should be considered by a committee of the whole House, the motion was rejected by 235 votes to 46. With that, the petition was dead and the Chartist Convention moved on to the "ulterior measures" it now needed to pursue.

Text of the first petition
Unto the Honourable the Commons of the United Kingdom of Great Britain and Ireland in Parliament assembled, the Petition of the undersigned, their suffering countrymen,
HUMBLY SHEWETH,

"That we, your petitioners, dwell in a land where merchants are noted for enterprise, whose manufacturers are very skilful, and whose workmen are proverbial for their industry.

"The land itself is goodly, the soil rich, and the temperature wholesome; it is abundantly furnished with the materials of commerce and trade; it has numerous and convenient harbours; in facility of internal communication it exceeds all others.

"For three-and-twenty years we have enjoyed a profound peace. Yet with all these elements of national prosperity, and with every disposition and capacity to take advantage of them, we find ourselves overwhelmed with public and private suffering.

"We are bowed down under a load of taxes; which, notwithstanding, fall greatly short of the wants of our rulers; our traders are trembling on the verge of bankruptcy; our workmen are starving; capital brings no profit and labour no remuneration; the home of the artificer is desolate, and the warehouse of the pawnbroker is full; the workhouse is crowded and the manufactory is deserted.

"We have looked upon every side, we have searched diligently in order to find out the causes of a distress so sore and so long continued.

"We can discover none, in nature, or in providence.

"Heaven has dealt graciously by the people; but the foolishness of our rulers has made the goodness of God of none effect.

"The energies of a mighty kingdom have been wasted in building up the power of selfish and ignorant men, and its resources squandered for their aggrandisement.

"The good of a party has been advanced to the sacrifice of the good of the nation; the few have governed for the interest of the few, while the interest of the many has been neglected, or insolently and tyrannously trampled upon.

"It was the fond expectation of the people that a remedy for the greater part, if not for the whole, of their grievances, would be found in the Reform Act of 1832.

"They were taught to regard that Act as a wise means to a worthy end; as the machinery of an improved legislation, when the will of the masses would be at length potential.

"They have been bitterly and basely deceived.

"The fruit which looked so fair to the eye has turned to dust and ashes when gathered.

"The Reform Act has effected a transfer of power from one domineering faction to another, and left the people as helpless as before.

"Our slavery has been exchanged for an apprenticeship to liberty, which has aggravated the painful feeling of our social degradation, by adding to it the sickening of still deferred hope.

"We come before your Honourable House to tell you, with all humility, that this state of things must not be permitted to continue; that it cannot long continue without very seriously endangering the stability of the throne and the peace of the kingdom; and that if by God's help and all lawful and constitutional appliances an end can be put to it, we are fully resolved that it shall speedily come to an end.

"We tell your Honourable House that the capital of the master must no longer be deprived of its due reward; that the laws which make food dear, and those which, by making money scarce, make labour cheap, must be abolished; that taxation must be made to fall on property, not on industry; that the good of the many, as it is the only legitimate end, so must it be the sole study of the Government.

"As a preliminary essential to these and other requisite changes; as means by which alone the interests of the people can be effectually vindicated and secured, we demand that those interests be confided to the keeping of the people.

"When the State calls for defenders, when it calls for money, no consideration of poverty or ignorance can be pleaded, in refusal or delay of the call. Required, as we are universally, to support and obey the laws, nature and reason entitle us to demand that in the making of the laws, the universal voice shall be implicitly listened to. We perform the duties of freemen; we must have the privileges of freemen. Therefore, we demand universal suffrage. The suffrage, to be exempt from the corruption of the wealthy and the violence of the powerful, must be secret."

Source: Place MSS., 27,820, f. 374. [July 1838].
Cited in British Working Class Movements: Select Documents 1789-1875 edited by GDH Cole and AW Filson (Macmillan, 1951).

Petition on behalf of the Chartist prisoners - 1841
During the spring of 1841, with both William Lovett and Feargus O'Connor in prison, the Chartist movement lacked its two high profile leaders. Undaunted, and largely thanks to the efforts of the radical MP Thomas Slinsgsby Duncombe, the Chartists quietly set about collecting 1,339,298 signatures seeking a pardon for John Frost and others who had been transported to Australia for their part in the Newport rebellion. The petition was presented to Parliament by Duncombe on 21 May 1841, and came within a single vote of being accepted. Read more about the 1841 petition.

Second national petition - 1842
This was the largest of the Chartist petitions, with 3,315,752 names - an outstanding achievement considering that the adult population of England, Scotland and Wales was under 10 million. Writing in the Northern Star (7 May, 1842), Feargus O'Connor told how, on the morning of Monday 2 May, 1842,

"all was bustle and excitement in the neighbourhood of 'Our House' - each man vieing with his fellow in rendering all the assistance in his power to make our demonstration as powerful as possible". Sixteen trade union delegates selected to carry the petition on their shoulders to Parliament were "just able to move" under its weight...

"Our Petition smashed the door frames of the narrow House - it broke them in pieces - it took forty or fifty men to carry in the fragments. I took a famous lump on my shoulder to the table of the House. Beesley also had a share in it."

The petition was enormous. In his Chartism: A New History, Malcolm Chase says that it ran to six miles of paper and weighed more than six hundredweight or 305kg. Seven bands accompanied it on the procession through London, and the door to the Chamber did indeed have to be dismantled to allow it into the House of Commons.

The petition was formally presented by Thomas Slingsby Duncombe. In his speech, he stated the names "only of those cities, hamlets and towns in which more than 10,000 signatures have been attached". These were:

A few days earlier, on 29 April , the Chartist National Convention had been given a list of petition sheets received which gives further details of localities' contributions.

Despite this show of strength, Duncombe's motion to hear the petitioners at the bar of the House was defeated by 287 votes to 49.

Third national petition - 1848
The best known and most controversial of the Chartist petitions was that drawn up in 1848 and taken to Parliament on 10 April following the Chartist rally on Kennington Common.

Famously, Feargus O'Connor (now MP for Nottingham) told the House of Commons that the petition had 5,700,000 signatures. Three days later, on 13 April, Mr Thornley for the Commons committee on public petitions responded that

"Upon the most careful examination of the number of signatures in the committee, with the assistance of thirteen law stationers' clerks, who acted under the superintendence of the various clerks of the committeees, the number of signatures attached to the petition does not, in the opinion of the committee, exceed 1,975,496. - (Hear.) It is further found, that a large number of the signatures were consecutively written in the same hand. It was also observed that a large number of the signatures were those of persons who could not be supposed to have concurred in its prayer; among those were the name of her Majesty, signed Victoria Rex, the Duke of Wellington, Sir Robert Peel, &c., &c. There was also noticed a large number of names which were evidently fictitious, such as 'Pugnose,' 'Longnose,' 'Flatnose,' 'Punch,' 'Snooks,' 'Fubbs,' and also numerous obscene names, which the committee would not offend the house of its dignity by repeating but which evidently belonged to no human being."
(Northern Star, 15 April, 1848)

An outraged O'Connor replied that it would have been quite impossible for 13 clerks to have counted even 1,900,000 signatures in the time. He stood by his claim of 5.7 million names and added that, as a further sign of the petition's size, it had been "contained in four or five large bundles, andit took himself, assisted by four or five other persons, to lift the largest of the bundles".

To this, Thornley retorted that the petition had been weighed that morning, and found to total five and three-quarter hundredweight (292kg). Opponents of the Charter now joined the attack, the Earl of Arundel and Surrey maintaining that far from attracting 400,000 supporters, as O'Connor had claimed, the Kennington Common meeting had been attended by just 15,000. As further evidence of the petition's unreliability, it was claimed that 8,200 out of every 100,000 signatories were women.

This petition, like its predecessors, was clearly dead, and when the Commons debated Feargus O'Connor's motion that the House should adopt the Charter, only 15 MPs could be found to support it. They were:

Punch rapidly lost its early sympathy for the Chartists. After the 1848 petition was claimed to include numerous bogus signatures, it noted that "the parties that have contributed the largest amount of signatures were not forthcoming to back the document on the day of its presentation".

In addition to the various "Pugnoses, Flatnoses and other great nasal organs of Chartist opinion", and "had the petition been anything but a hoax, Her Majesty would have been at an early hour wending her way towards Kennington Common with seventeen Dukes of Wellington at her side, and Sir R Peel would have been conspicuous in the van that was bearing the monster document".

Fourth national petition - 1849
By November 1848, with many of its leading activists in prison, the National Charter Association was in such a state of crisis that a conference ostensibly called to deal with the land company's affairs now decided to overturn the organisation's constitution and abolish the paid executive in favour of a voluntary body and paid secretary.

Despite this, and the downbeat mood of most activists, Feargus O'Connor now called for a further attempt to petition Parliament, this time through a series of local petitions based on a centrally agreed text.

In the end, just 19 petitions were presented. Much of the country was unrepresented, and even Feargus o'Connor's Northern Star (7 July, 1849) failed to report a claimed figure for the number of signatories. This time, O'Connor's motion won the backing of just 13 MPs and two tellers. There were just 53,816 signatures to the combined petitions.

Fifth national petition - 1851
With Ernest Jones now at its head, the National Charter Association managed a brief flicker of revival in membership during 1850. The NCA convention held on 31 March 1851 adopted a platform of "the Charter and something more", along with an ambitious work programme, including a further national petition.

By May 1852, when Jones called a further conference in Manchester, nothing had been done to act on this, and the tiny gathering of just six delegates agreed to repeat the 1849 tactic of separate local petitions based on a common text.

In his History of the Chartist Movement, R G Gammage writes that, when the time came, the Southwark MP Apsley Pellatt agreed to present the petition, "but neither he, nor any other member, could at that time be prevailed on to make a motion on the subject'. Malcolm Chase (Chartism: A New History) notes that the 20 petitions presented had just 11,834 signatures, "barely a fifth of the disappointing muster in 1849".

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